All these sorts of things were cooked up in the depths of some HR department somewhere, likely by people who fundamentally don't understand technical skillsets.

All these sorts of things were cooked up in the depths of some HR department somewhere, likely by people who fundamentally don't understand technical skillsets. They provide some level of false utility by allowing people to compartmentalize otherwise highly complex systems (knowledge sets) into simple ideas. Skillsets are highly complex assemblies that can't be summed up or generalized. Doing things like that give us the hilariously misguided strategies that make HR folks hand out Myers Briggs tests for culture fit checks. I know for myself that a lot of my skills are actually just fancy applications of thought processes and theory, expressed in code. Trying to box that into this goofy trichotomy will just confuse someone.